I can appreciate what the director of “The Moleman…” is going for, but with his indie horror comedy, it often felt like a misfire in every sense. The DVD cover is quick to compare this to “Shaun of the Dead,” but while they were losers, they were at least likable. It’s really tough to empathize or root for two main characters who lure an old man to dinner to have him be eaten by the mole man, or are so stupid they leave a box of kittens in the trunk of their car and accidentally suffocate them all. I should be rooting for them, the script says, but in reality I just found them to be complete morons.
I can forgive the undertone of animal cruelty, but there’s sadly not a lot of pay off when it comes to the movie at all. It spends about sixty percent of its time focusing on these two characters who get high, get drunk, and half the time bicker about anything and everything. The other forty percent is based around this mole man that lives in the vents who has a knack for stealing the small dogs and cats of the tenants of a rundown apartment building for dinner. No one has large dogs in this building? And what apartment building has a mail slot on their front door?
In either case, a lot of arguments could be made for the holes in the logic, but the movie insists on thinking of itself as a horror comedy but with almost no horror. The one time we do see the moleman, he’s stealing a small dog and leaps over our screaming main characters. The rest of the script involves the duo trying to patch up holes to keep him from stealing the animals, and failing every single time to do so. And no one seriously notices when their animals are gone?
I recall a time where my small dog went missing and my parents stopped all activity and went searching for her until she was found. In “The Moleman…” the tenants have their dogs taken by the monster, they turn asking “Where’s my fucking dog?” and go about their business. It’s that string of illogical behavior that makes this comedy hard to invest time in to without looking for something better to watch. “The Moleman of Belmont Avenue” has a ton of potential to be a raucous and creepy horror comedy, but it can’t quite live up to it. Even when the writers build some semblance of redemption for these two characters in the finale.